Dissecting American Health CareCommentaries on Health, Policy, and Politics

Douglas B. Kamerow, MD

The intersection of health care, politics, and policy is a controversial one, and this book of lively essays takes on all of today‘s hot health topics: alternative medicine, health care reform, screening mammograms, taxes to decrease soda consumption, gun control, and many more.

Former Assistant Surgeon General Douglas Kamerow, a family doctor, journal editor, NPR commentator, and Chief Scientist at RTI International, combines evidence, opinion, and humor in 47 short essays taken from his health policy columns in the international medical journal BMJ and his nationally broadcast radio commentaries.

• “Just as ‘on the web no one knows you are a dog,’ it is also true that on the web many will not know you are a charlatan or a well-meaning naïf.”

• “The Pope‘s job is to be the spiritual leader of the world‘s Catholics. It would be a true blessing if he could do that without advocating policies that endanger the health of some of the world‘s neediest people.”

• “Screening people at one-day themed events, let alone on the web, strikes me as both a waste of everyone‘s time and a misleading promise of diagnosis and treatment that probably won‘t be delivered.”

Dissecting American Health Care is published by RTI Press, Research Triangle Park, NC